Carmen
Two Weeks Later
“I can’t do it,” I whispered. “I can’t. I just can’t.”
“It’s gonna be okay, Carmen,” Lori whispered. She carefully reached up a hand and brushed back a loose strand of hair that had fallen from the complex bun wound around the back of my head. Smoothing the veil into place, she kept repeating that. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”
I didn’t want to cry. It felt like that was all I’d been doing for the last two weeks, the last few months, even the last few years. Every day seemed worse than the last. But this had to be the bottom. Rock bottom. The tear trickled down my face, carving a tiny little path through my makeup.
Lori grabbed a tissue and dabbed it away. I didn’t move. I sat still and stared at the ground, not really seeing anything. “Maybe things will work out,” she offered hopefully.
I looked up at her. “How could things possibly work out?”
She looked back, her eyes soft and sympathetic, trying to find the right combination of words to soothe my fears and make me feel like maybe, just maybe, the last few good things in my life weren’t totally crumbling to pieces around me. “I don’t know,” she admitted finally. “But they might.”
I turned my eyes to the bouquet in my hand. It was filled with while lilies. Their petals were smooth and creamy. I extended a finger and stroked one, but as soon as I touched it, the petal detached itself from the flower and fell fluttering to the ground. What a perfect metaphor for the way today was going.
“He is handsome,” she said. “At least there’s that.”
It was true; Ben was handsome. He was every bit as rugged and dark as I remembered him being, even though I’d only seen glimpses of him in the two weeks that had gone by since my father had come home and informed me that I would be marrying him as soon as it was possible to arrange the ceremony.
I didn’t believe him at first. No father could be so casually cruel.
“Daddy, you’re not serious.”
No reply. Just that stare.
“No, Daddy, wait. That doesn’t make any sense.”
Still nothing.
“Don’t I have a choice in this? It’s my life you’re ruining!”
“You made your choice when you let that animal empty his seed into you.”
What could I possibly say to that? What kind of father said something like that to his only daughter? There was nothing that could have prepared me for that kind of conversation. I was out of my depth by miles.
I wondered where the father I used to know had gone. Before my mother died, he was the best dad a girl could ask for. I remembered laughing when he sat me in front of him on his motorcycle and let me use two hands to twist the throttle. I remembered all those little memories of him and me, the ones every daughter shares with her father: painting his nails, forcing him to indulge in my tea time fantasies, him tossing me in the air. Those were the bread and butter.
We had our own special moments, too. The motorcycle, the day he taught me how to flick out a switchblade knife, the time he kept me out of school for a week for no other reason than to ride down to Mexico and play in the surf. Just the three of us—my father, my mother, and me—all alone on a white sand beach, splashing in the water without a care in the world.
But a few months before my mother’s murder, something had changed. I remembered the day perfectly.
I was fifteen years old. It was a half-day at school, and I’d finished my homework quickly so I could lay out in the backyard and tan. I was stretched out on a towel, basking in the sun and on the verge of drifting off to sleep, when I heard a huge crash from inside. I sat upright and whipped off my sunglasses. I couldn’t see anything from where I was sitting, so I got up and walked over to the window that looked in on the living room. Pressing my face against it, I saw the coffee table had been upended. The glass vase that usually sat in the center, the one my mother loved to fill with fresh cut flowers from our garden, was now shattered into a million pieces spread out across the floor. My mother was cowering in one corner as my father loomed over her. Their voices were muffled through the window, and I could only make out a few things they were saying.
“Tell me who it was!” he roared.
“Nothing happened, James,” she begged. “Nothing, I swear.”
“Tell me!”
“James, you have to believe me.”
He raised a hand high in the air as if he were about to hit her. I found my voice then and screamed. They looked at me simultaneously, saw me standing on the other side of the glass, tears running down my face. I’d never so much as seen them argue before. My dad was always the picture of calm reserve. Always in control, always smooth. But when he looked at me, I saw his face wrinkled in purple rage. My mother’s eyes were round and teary. She mouthed, “Please go away,” but I couldn’t seem to make my feet work.
The second Daddy saw me, though, his hand fell to his side and the anger drained from his features. He became the Daddy I knew again, the calm one, the normal one. The one who loved us. Without another word, he bent over and started to pick up the pieces of broken glass.
I ran to Lori’s. I cried as I explained the scene to her, and she calmed me down until I fell asleep in her bed, curled up with a teddy bear between my arms. She woke me up a little while later and told me my dad was outside.
I was so tentative walking out front where he was waiting on the back of his bike. I didn’t know what father would be there: the one who had raised me, or the one who’d screamed at my mother and looked at her with so much hate. He smiled sadly as I walked up. “Climb on, Carmen. Let’s go home.”
I was scared to touch him at first. But I climbed on like he asked and we wheeled quietly down the road, back to the house. Once we were inside and I’d showered and changed into pajamas, he tucked me into bed. It had been a long time since he’d done that. I was fifteen, after all. Not his little girl anymore, but almost a woman. In this moment, though, I needed my daddy to comfort me.
The lights in my bedroom were dark. “I’m sorry that happened today,” he whispered from where he sat next to me. “I lost my temper. I just want you to know I love you and your mother very much and I’d never do anything to hurt either of you.”
“It’s okay, Daddy,” I squeaked. I felt too tired to hold onto my fear or my suspicion. Besides, he seemed so normal. Like everything in the world was right again.
“Goodnight, princess.” He kissed me on the forehead and left the room.
For the few months between that incident and the day I was pulled out of class by an urgently whispering school secretary, I almost forgot about the fight and the broken vase. But when the secretary put a gentle hand on my lower back and guided me to the front foyer of the school, I saw Daddy standing there and I knew things weren’t right at all. They weren’t fixed. They were more broken than ever.
“Carmen,” Lori whispered. I looked up. I didn’t know how long I’d been sitting without moving while I reminisced. My leg had gone numb, circulation cut off by the edge of the chair I sat in. I stared at Lori dumbly. She jerked her head towards the door.
My father stood in the doorway, as massive and snowy as ever. He wore a trim navy suit and a white shirt, pressed crisply until it was completely free of wrinkles. “Lori, could you give me a moment with my daughter,” he said. It wasn’t really a question.
Lori murmured something and quickly left the room through another door. I swallowed. He walked slowly across the room to sit in the chair Lori had just vacated.
When his smell hit me—that familiar, fatherly smell, the clean scent of shaving cream and cologne and just a hint of oily steel that set him apart from almost every other man I knew—I felt the tears well up again.
“I can’t go through with this, Daddy. You can’t make me.”
It was hard to explain why I was so afraid. Hadn’t my night with Ben been otherworldly? I’d played it back so many times in my head, while falling asleep, or relived it in my dreams. Every time he’d texted or called me, I’d wanted so badly just to pick up the phone and hear his sexy rumble again.
Maybe it was because I started to associate Ben with my father’s wrath. The night I came home from the party was like the day of the vase all over again, except this time, I was in my mother’s shoes. I’d cowered against a wall. Begged. Sobbed. When he raised his hand above his head, I wanted so desperately for someone, anyone, to intervene.
But there was no one. Nothing to stop that hand from hurtling down from far above and striking me bluntly across the cheek. Nothing to stem the flow of blood from my split lip. It was just me and him. Not the Daddy I remembered, but the one I feared.
So yeah, maybe Ben was an angel in my memories. A dark angel with a tongue between my legs and a hand in my hair. But my father had been an angel, too. Until he wasn’t anymore.
“You’re going to do it, Carmen.” His voice was soft and hard at the same time, like velvet wrapped around steel. “I refuse to take care of some bastard grandchild. You made the mistake, and now you will do what it takes to fix it.”
“Can’t I do something else? Anything?”
“There is nothing else you can do.”
“But, Daddy, please.” The tears were thick now.
He stood up. “It’s almost time. Finish getting ready.”
Then he left.